Musée Courbet

Ornans is a small town on the Loue river in Franche-Comté, in the department of the Doubs, and it is the birthplace of Gustave Courbet, one of the great painters of the nineteenth century and the leader of the Realist movement. The Musée Courbet is a departmental museum on the Place Robert Fernier, set in a historic house of the old centre that belonged to the painter's family, close to the river. It is the place to understand how the town and the valley shaped his art.

Courbet was born in Ornans in 1819 and left for Paris as a young man, but he came back often. In the 1840s and 1850s he made his name with large paintings of ordinary people and rural scenes, treated with the seriousness that had been reserved for history painting, and which shocked the critics of the time. Among them was A Burial at Ornans, a monumental canvas showing a funeral in his home town, with local people as the models, which now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. His landscapes, particularly the views of the Loue valley, its rocks, springs and caves, and his hunting scenes and pictures of the forest, are among his best-loved works. A political activist, he was imprisoned after the Paris Commune of 1871 for his part in the toppling of the Vendôme column, and he spent his last years in exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1877.

The museum shows paintings, drawings and sculpture by Courbet and his circle, as well as works by other artists linked to the town and the region, and documents about his life. It does not hold the best known canvases, which are in the great museums of Paris and elsewhere, but it gives the context of the place where they began, and its temporary exhibitions explore different aspects of his art and of the Realist movement. Opening hours depend on the season, with daily opening in summer and shorter hours with some closing days in the rest of the year, and the museum is closed on certain public holidays. Entrance is charged, with reduced rates for older visitors, students and large families, and free admission for children under 18, job seekers and on the first Sunday of the month. The ticket gives a reduction on other attractions of the region, such as the Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans and the Citadel of Besançon.

The museum suits art lovers, those following Courbet's trail and anyone visiting the Loue valley. Allow an hour or two. The walk along the river, past the houses on the water, gives a view of the places that he painted.